From Russian dissident and author,
Nathan Sharansky
Sharansky takes to task utopian secular thinking, which claims that peace requires the extinction of all passionate attachments, national, religious or whatever. His antagonist is "post-identity" theory, for example, the head of the Modern Language Association who said, "Cosmopolites not only or even principally owe an allegiance to their place of birth but also to a broader, more worldly, supra and transnational world view," as opposed to the "negative consequences of resurgent nationalism, ethnic separatism,
and religious fundamentalism".
Europe may have succeeded in eliminating nationalism, or rather, nationalism burnt itself out in two hideously destructive World Wars. As a result children no longer are born to the Europeans. The problem is self-liquidating.
On the other hand, the two countries considered most suspect for their nationalism by the supposedly enlightened Europeans, the United States and Israel, are the only ones in the entire industrial world to reproduce at above replacement level. Sharansky is beating if not a dead horse, then a sterile one. All that secular enlightenment can say to humanity is what that exemplar of the enlightenment, Frederick the Great of Prussia, barked at his fleeing soldiers during the 1757 Battle of Kolin: Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, do you want to live forever?).
Countries subject to communist rule, the most atheistic and internationalist, also show by far the lowest birth rates.
Projected population in formerly communist countries
| Population (Thousands) | 2005 | 2050 | % Change |
| Ukraine | 46918 | 25514 | -46% |
| Georgia | 4473 | 2575 | -42% |
| Belarus | 9795 | 5746 | -41% |
| Moldova | 3877 | 2330 | -40% |
Russia itself is not far behind Belarus and Moldova in the race to national extinction.
From a French "fisherman":
The carps are telling me that nothing will prevent the fall of Europe – the people who could have changed this outcome have waited too long. And the salmon too cannot make out a precise course to follow in order to traverse the next decades head held high. It will be a tempest – rivers will leave their beds, winds will blow in all directions and it will be the instinctive and intuitive decisions, more so than strategies, politicians and ideologies that will save, or not, the people caught in the storm.
And so I advise those willing to listen to look within themselves, and to prepare to use more often and more intensely their conscience and their courage. And the only concrete action, the only culture that seems to me worthy of promoting, is that of encouraging people to love one another, to have children, to love them, to resolve to fix as a primordial goal that of giving your children a better chance than what we give them today.
